Google has recently published their monthly "Search quality highlights" post. In March, Google made 50 changes. What are the most important changes and do you have to change something on your web pages?

In the news: Google recommends to remove all paid links, no matter how old they are, users that block your site in Google's search results can influence your rankings, details about Google's AdWords Quality Score and more.

Google has recently published their monthly "Search quality highlights" post. In March, Google made 50 changes. What are the most important changes and do you have to change something on your web pages?

Not all of Google's changes affect your rankings

Most of the 50 changes that Google did in March won't affect your search engine rankings. For example, Google's Autocomplete feature now supports math symbols. This makes it easier to search for popular equations such as E = mc2 but it doesn't affect the majority of the searches.

Here are the changes that will have the biggest impact on the search results:

1. Tweaks to handling of anchor text and better interpretation and use of anchor text

Google announced two changes regarding anchor texts:

"We turned off a classifier related to anchor text (the visible text appearing in links). Our experimental data suggested that other methods of anchor processing had greater success, so turning off this component made our scoring cleaner and more robust."

"We’ve improved systems we use to interpret and use anchor text, and determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website."

What does this mean for your website?

Unfortunately, Google doesn't go into detail. One can only guess. It might be that an anchor text now only counts if the surrounding content is also related to the topic of the anchor text.

If the links to a web page overuse the same anchor text, the value of these links might be lowered.

To do: Check the backlinks of your website with a backlink analysis tool. The anchor texts that point to a website should contain the targeted keywords but they should also vary.

2. Better handling of queries with both navigational and local intent

"A navigational query is a search where it looks like the user is looking to navigate to a particular website, such as 'New York Times' [...]

What if the user doesn’t actually know the right URL? What if the URL they’re searching for seems to be a parked domain (with no content)? This change improves results for this kind of search."

"This change improves the balance of results we show, and helps ensure you’ll find highly relevant navigational results or local results towards the top of the page as appropriate for your query."

What does this mean for your website?

These changes mean that Google will prefer navigational and local results on the top of the result list if Google is sure that you're looking for a local service or a particular website.

In an online discussion, Google's John Mueller gave the following advice:

"Regarding the age of the unnatural links, I'd work to have them all removed, regardless of the age. For instance, in the general case where a site has been buying links for 2 years, it would be a good idea to go back that far. [...]

If you're serious about your site's standing in our search results, then I'd strongly advise not to try to wait the penalty out. These are generally not issues that expire after a few days, they can affect your site's standing for quite some time."

Google's Matt Cutts answers that question in a video. If a website is blocked by many users that look real to Google, then the blocks can affect the rankings of a website. Matt Cutts says that Google tries to filter fake spam votes but this still looks like an issue that could be abused by competitors.

In an online discussion, Google's Tanmay Arora discussed the "ingredients" of Google's AdWords Quality Score. The relevance of a keyword is not entirely determined by its presence on the landing page but also by the number of users clicking on your ad when they search for that keyword.

New keywords get a historical Quality Score until they have their own statistics. The click is based on exact match keywords. The more impressions a keyword has, the more important is the click through rate of an ad.

Editor's note: further information on how to improve your Google AdWords campaigns can be found here.